Setup Your Dev Environment

Now that all of the requirements are installed, its time to get your environment up and running.

Setup Your Database

Semester.ly stores objects like courses, timetables, and students in a Postgres database. Let’s get one setup for you.

Let’s first initialize Postgres using the default user account postgres

Note

If using Linux log into this account with

sudo -i -u postgres

Then, enter Postgres environment with

psql postgres

Note

If you see an error in CentOS / Fedora, it’s most likely due to postgres is not running. Initialize it with sudo service postgresql initdb && sudo service postgresql start.

Here you can enter SQL to create/manipulate/access databases. Let’s create a Semester.ly database. Enter:

CREATE DATABASE semesterly;

Then, create a database user, set myusername and mypassword to whatever you wish

CREATE USER myusername WITH PASSWORD 'mypassword';

Finally, grant all access to the created database to your new user, myusername:

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE semesterly TO myusername;

Great. You are all set. Enter the following to quit psql:

\q

Note

If using Linux exit postgres by

exit

Note

For CentOS / Fedora, Change all occurances of ident to md5 in pg_hba.conf. You can modify the file through sudo vim /var/lib/pgsql9/data/pg_hba.conf. After you change it, restart postgres with sudo service postgresql restart.

Create Local Settings

Now that you have a database created we need to inform Django of the configuration. Do so by creating a new file called local_settings.py and placing it in the semesterly/ directory within your workspace. You should find that there is already a similar file called settings.py found in the same folder.

The contents of this file should be:

DEBUG = True

TEMPLATE_DEBUG = DEBUG

DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.postgresql_psycopg2',
        'NAME': 'semesterly',
        'USER': 'myusername',
        'PASSWORD': 'mypassword',
        'HOST': 'localhost',
        'PORT': '5432',
    }
}

Note

Be sure to change the values of myusername and mypassword to the values you chose when creating your user!

Migrate Your Database

Now that Django knows about the database, it can conform the empty database to our schema. Simply execute:

python manage.py migrate

Edit your /etc/hosts

For development purposes, we map http://sem.ly:8000 to http://localhost:8000. To do this locally, execute the following line of bash:

sudo sh -c "echo '127.0.0.1       sem.ly jhu.sem.ly uoft.sem.ly vandy.sem.ly chapman.sem.ly umich.sem.ly gw.sem.ly umd.sem.ly' >> /etc/hosts"

Note

If you add a school, be sure to add it to this file!

Set your Environment Type

Add the following line to either your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc which tells webpack you are running a development environment:

export NODE_ENV=development

Then source ~/.bashrc or source ~/.zshrc

And make sure the following line returns “development”

echo $NODE_ENV

Install & Run Webpack

Webpack compiles our React componenets into one application wide javascript bundle. We use chromedriver to test them.

To install them if you are testing in chrome install:

npm install -g webpack chromedriver

To install them if you are using firefox or a 32 bit operating system (like lubuntu) run:

npm install -g webpack

Then run it with:

npm run watch

Note

Always leave npm run watch running. It will continuously watch your javascript files and recompile automatically upon any edits/changes.

Running the Server

Now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for! Let’s run the server! (Be sure to leave the last npm run watch command running)

python manage.py runserver

Navigate to http://sem.ly:8000, and if everything loads, you should be all set :). You did it!

Your Final Setup

Great work. Your Semester.ly local environment is all setup.

Don’t forget: whenever you are working on Semester.ly you should have one terminal running the server (via python manage.py runserver), and one running webpack (via npm run watch).

Note

Don’t forget to always work from your virtual environment! From the root directory, just execute source /venv/bin/activate to enter it.

Happy hacking! To fill up your database, be sure to checkout Loading the Database.